Why is Belmont's Wellington Elementary's exterior peeling?

Adrian Thomas

Tuesday

Dec 4, 2018 at 4:34 AM

Just over seven years after it was built, the wood exterior of Belmont’s Wellington Elementary School has changed. When it was built in 2011, Wellington building committee member, Pat Brusch, told the Belmont Citizen-Herald the wood exterior would never need maintenance. But now, to the untrained eye at least, it appears to need work.

However, Brusch says there is no need to worry and the wood itself is actually in good condition.

“It doesn’t (need maintenance), and it still doesn’t. The stain does not need to be scraped off,” Brusch said. “It is peeling, it was supposed to peel.”

The outside of Wellington is largely made up of Ipe, or Brazilian walnut, which is an extremely hard type of wood. Brusch and Mark Haley, another former Wellington building committee member, have worked on building committees in Belmont for nearly three decades.

According to Brusch and Haley, the Ipe that covers the exterior of Wellington was originally coated with a topical stain when the school was built. Brusch acknowledges the school does not look nice right now but assures nothing is wrong with the wood.

According to Steve Dorrance, Belmont’s director of facilities, Ipe fares best when it is near saltwater, which prevents mold from growing within the fibers of the wood and causing decay. Because of Belmont’s inland location, the Ipe siding on the Wellington needed to be coated with a topical stain to protect the wood.

Dorrance, who was not working for the town when the Wellington was built, says the current coating is likely latex-based on the exterior of Wellington, and does not fully absorb into the hard Ipe. Dorrance thinks that an oil-based stain would have lasted longer.

“Oil would have penetrated the wood and formed a tighter molecular bond whereas the latex is sitting on top of the wood and it’s flaking off in a lot of places,” Dorrance said.

According to Haley, the Ipe exterior of the Wellington has nothing to do structurally with the school, but rather is purely for aesthetic purposes. The outer Ipe shield covering Wellington’s core structure is called a rainscreen, protecting the building from the elements.

“The rainscreens are making the building very tight so the energy efficiency goes up,” Haley said.

However, Haley concedes the building committee did not think the stain would come off the way that it has.

“We felt it was going to fade, not chip,” Haley said. “The Ipe is so hard, the stain does not penetrate.”

The Wellington Building Committee’s work is done and it has turned over the property to the town. That’s where Dorrance comes in.

Dorrance believes the current condition of the building does not pose any immediate structural threat, but if the the stain is peeling is not addressed soon, repair costs in the future could be very high.

“We can’t do anything with this until we get the funding,” Dorrance said. “There is increasing sensitivity that we probably aren’t funding our maintenance budget the way we should fund it.”

Dorrance said the facilities department is consulting with an architect to try and come up with a solution to the preserve Wellington’s Ipe exterior.

Adrian Thomas is a Boston University journalism student reporting as part of a collaboration between the Belmont Citizen Herald and the Boston University News Service.